ANOTHER lower court judge blocks Trump admin from ending DACA

(National Sentinel) Judicial Activism: A second lower federal court has blocked President Donald J. Trump from rescinding the so-called DACA “Dreamers” program, ruling that the administration has not given a valid reason for doing so.

Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis acknowledged that the Executive Branch has the authority to end the program, which was implemented by President Obama via executive order in 2012, but that “it must give a sound reason for doing so — and the Homeland Security Department’s September 2017 rationale fell far short of what is required in that regard,” the Washington Timesreported Tuesday.

Garaufis even incorporated Trump’s own tweets into his ruling, noting that in recent weeks the president pledged to “revisit” the issue.

Trump rescinded the program in September, giving Congress six months to come up with a legislative fix. The deadline is March 5, and already Congress is up against it, having yet to come up with compromises between Democratic demands for amnesty and Republican demands for Trump’s border wall, ending chain migration, and other changes to current immigration law.

“The question before the court is thus not whether defendants could end the DACA program, but whether they offered legally adequate reasons for doing so,” wrote Judge Garaufis, a Clinton appointee to the court in New York. “Based on its review of the record before it, the court concludes that defendants have not done so.”

He is the second federal judge to rule against Trump’s decision to rescind DACA, which stands for Delayed Action on Childhood Arrivals, which applies largely to people in the country illegally who were brought here by their parents.

The program delayed deportation proceedings against those people, granting them temporary legal status to remain in the country.

Obama implemented the program shortly before the 2012 election despite admitting several times he did not have the authority as president to single-handedly change immigration law.

The Trump administration said Garafis’ ruling doesn’t change much; the judge noted that the president has the authority to end the program if it is done properly. And he said the administration had to begin processing DACA applications again, but that it did not have to approve them.

An earlier ruling by Judge William Alsup in California is already being appealed by the Justice Department. The administration also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case, skipping over the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Times noted.